German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party received an electoral boost yesterday in a regional vote which also handed her coalition allies a big defeat ahead of national elections in 2013.
After a string of stinging blows last year, the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) was kicked out of the state parliament in western Saarland after gaining just over 1.5 per cent of the vote, according to early projections.
Mrs Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has governed in a national coalition with the FDP since 2009, retained its position as the state’s strongest party winning about 34.5 per cent.
The main opposition Social Democrats (SPD) saw a marked improvement on their 2009 result in Saarland, taking over 30 per cent and are expected to govern in a “grand coalition” with the CDU.
FDP general secretary Patrick Doering sought to put on a brave face, looking ahead to two upcoming regional votes in May, despite the party now having been humiliatingly kicked out of six states since last year.
“We will show there that organised liberalism in both states is strong enough to have an important function in Parliament and in responsibility,” he said after the Saarland vote.
The vote in the small south-western Saarland which borders Luxembourg and France was the first of three quick-fire state ballots ahead of the more strategically important Schleswig-Holstein on May 6 and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) a week later.
After a gruelling seven regional votes last year, Mrs Merkel and her junior Free Democrats were only due to fight one in 2012, but that unexpectedly swelled to three after the sudden collapse of Saarland and NRW state governments.
As Germany’s most populous state with 18 million people and a major industrial base, NRW’s centre-left minority government fell after just 22 months over a budget dispute.
The state historically plays a big role in federal politics – in 2005, a lost vote in NRW prompted then chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to call a snap federal election, which he then lost to Merkel.
Kicking off the electoral season, Saarland, a small region of about 800,000 voters, called snap elections after the coalition of FDP, CDU and Greens – a first for Germany – collapsed in January.
The far-left Linke party won around 16 per cent in Saarland and the Pirate party, which burst on to the German political scene last September, won its second footing in a state parliament with more than seven per cent.
The FDP peaked in the last national election, grabbing more than 14 percent of the vote and formed a coalition government with Merkel’s CDU. But it has since seen its ratings dwindle amid internal squabbling and political strategies that have backfired.
Humiliatingly, it also lost its parliamentary footing in five of last year’s regional elections, and it defied Mrs Merkel last month in supporting Joachim Gauck as Germany’s new president, backing her into a corner.